Author Archives: Dan

Sunday Links

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics

If you’d like to increase your own brain power while you watch grown men drastically reduce theirs, may we suggest the following exercises:

Happy Sunday, folks!

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Authors, guides and nudges, Other Critics

The college football schedule is finally starting to get interesting, so I understand if you ignore my advice and just post up on your couch eating Funyuns. If you are looking for a slightly more refined weekend experience though, may I suggest the following:

  • Check out these amazing illustrations Salvador Dali drew for Don Quixote. The man’s work was so much more than melting clocks. [h/t to the Prufrock Newsletter]
  • Over at Slate, read Joseph Thomas’ account of trying to get the estate of Shel Silverstein to allow him to quote from the author’s works. This is something Ryan and I both know a bit about, as I published a piece on the lengths J.D. Salinger went to guard his personal letters from Ian Hamilton, and Ryan had the misfortune of trying to convince Sylvia Plath’s gatekeepers that a dissertation did not represent a market threat. Godspeed, Prof. Thomas.
  • Jordan Conn wrote a great piece at Grantland about how Oakland looks poised to lose all of its professional sports teams within the next decade. The article ends up being a profile of one of the more unique (for better and for worse) American cities in a time of simultaneous crisis and rebirth.
  • The always insightful Alan Jacobs has a great (and longish) review essay up at Books & Culture about Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge. Jacobs is a serious and generous critic, and while I don’t share his religious beliefs or politics, I appreciate that he spends so much of his time writing for non-academic audiences. More professors need to look outside the tower every now and then.
  • This is (another) shameless plug, but you should check out the Book Review section over at The Los Angeles Review, where I serve as Assistant Book Reviews Editor.
  • And, this [h/t Adam Ted Jacobson, via Gawker]:

Go See Cal

Posted on by under American Masculinity, guides and nudges, The Moronic Inferno

Before he died, quite suddenly, a few years back, my uncle and I had a Cal Worthington moment. If you were lucky enough to see one of Cal’s commercials, you know what I’m talking about. If not, here:

We were rapping about something, I don’t remember what, but somehow we got on to TV, which led to commercials, which led to Cal. My uncle swore Cal had been run out of Bakersfield on a rail, which is how he ended up in Long Beach. Near as I can tell from reading Sam Sweet’s great little Paris Review blast, that probably didn’t happen. But it also totally could have! Mid-century papertrails were made of actual paper, so tracing Cal’s movements up and down the spine of California would require work most of us just don’t want to put in anymore. But it’s almost better not knowing. Cal’s commercials were charming in their complete lack of cultural content. Compare Cal’s wingwalking and ape talking with this creepy garbage:

This paean to middle-American, conservative, rural, masculinity is the kind of fantasy Klaus Theweleit would tell us is an indication that we’re about two clicks away from fascism. It imagines a world where working class men are driving around in $40K trucks smiling about the prospect of going home and holding hands with high school sweethearts. In reality, the men who can afford to drive these trucks and the men who “get to work on time” aren’t the same dudes. In fact, there probably aren’t even jobs for the working class guys to go to anymore. And if this fantasy man ever did marry his best girl from high school, they probably got divorced a few years back when money got real tight. But Chevy thinks it’s best to lie to people about the country they live in. And they’re probably right.

Cal wasn’t interested in selling us an ideal. He just wanted to sell us cars. There’s a level of honesty in his ads that we’ll probably never see again. We’re so desperate to be cool, authentic, and, above all, validated by ads that we can only appreciate Cal’s spots ironically. “They’re so bad, they’re good!” To hell with that. They’re good because they’re memorable without being emotionally manipulative. Unlike Apple, or American Apparel, or Chevy, Cal Worthington respected us enough to make himself the fool in our place. That’s something worth buying.

Weekend Beats: Heavy Petty

Posted on by under Weekend Beats

“In my younger and more vulnerable years,” I thought She’s the One (1996!), directed by Ed Burns, was a great movie. It was about urban adults having affairs and feeling big important emotions, like guilt, lust, greed, and envy. To a nerdy teenager going to Catholic boys school in the suburbs, this all seemed so authentic. It also starred Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz (and Amanda Peet, and Leslie Mann) at the heights (or at least what I thought at the time were the heights) of their lady powers. This was a serious film, and I was a serious young man.

So yeah, the trailer doesn’t necessarily age well (that voice over is baaaaaad), but the movie’s still pretty decent, and the song in the background holds up. Tom Petty did the score for the movie, and “Walls” is my favorite of his songs from the 1990s. Yes, I know he had some classics in the early 1990s, but I stand by my statement. Do any of those other songs have Lindsey Buckingham on backing vocals? No? I rest my case. Enjoy the weekend (and this weird Eastern circus-themed video that probably cost a shitload of money to make), folks.

Cultural Literacy Redux

Posted on by under Authors, education, guides and nudges, Other Critics

I know I bash on the late-1960s morality play that is the “XX” blog over at Slate a lot, but outside of this little pocket of cliched topic sentences in search of evidence, Slate really is a great site. Troy Patterson is a big reason why this is so. Aside from being Slate‘s resident man of taste and class, he also has real chops. He’s the only person at that site (maybe save David Weigel) who I trust to use a term like “Tory” in an intellectually honest way. So I can’t say I was surprised to see that Patterson’s a man who takes E.D. Hirsch’s work seriously.

For those unfamiliar with Hirsch, he’s the kind of academic who would never get a tenure-track job today, even though, as Patterson points out (with an assist from one of this blog’s patron saints, Christopher Hitchens), many states are coming around to the idea that kids actually need to learn content in order to acquire skills. The fact that Hirsch’s concept of “cultural literacy” was ever controversial is evidence of the sad decadence and arrogance of some influential English and “Education” departments since the 1970s, when “theory” came into fashion and substituted Orwellian jargon for intelligence. Now, let me be clear (thanks for that phrase, Obama), most English departments are filled with people who really don’t care about what Derrida wrote (or said, or uttered, or whatever stupid word he mandated that we use). But even many of these people have to pretend like Derrida (or Foucault, or Butler, and…) is responsible for more than like 3 useful pages of ideas. One day this will change, but by then English departments may have specialized and de-literatured themselves out of existence.

In any case, Hirsch was and is a real weirdo: a tenured English professor who cares about teaching more than anything else. And not only teaching, as most profs will defend to the death their right to teach graduate seminars, but teaching K-12. What kind of suicidal English professor cares about kids he’s not actually teaching at the moment? One who understands that he will have to teach them at some point. More importantly, Hirsch is the kind of guy who actually thinks about the world beyond the classroom. While his love of testing and data makes me uncomfortable, if I had to pick a side in the education debate, it wouldn’t take me long to choose his over Dewey’s disciples preaching confidence over competence. Competence breeds confidence in the long run, and Hirsch understood that the best way to help the poor is to give them an education that will allow them to converse with and challenge those in positions of power. This is something David Foster Wallace also understood, and if you haven’t read “Tense Present” recently, go do that right now.

Back to Patterson though. I would have loved to see him extend his discussion of how the internet has changed what should be on Hirsch’s famous list of 10,000 terms/ideas/people/events that all Americans should know to consider how it has changed attitudes toward the value of knowing anything at all. Patterson writes:

Is it too bold to suppose that one must now know 10,000 basic things? Obviously, a lot has happened to general knowledge since the book’s publication, not a little of it connected to what now appears to be a lacuna on Hirsch’s list—a gap that developed between International Monetary Fund and interrogative sentence. The Internet is a force of information inflation, and much of the stuff on the list remains relevant, give or take a few relics and some slang terms (pop the question, bite the dust) now fully embedded in mainstream vocabulary.

He’s gazing down on what’s important here, but perhaps it’s too mixed up and awful for him to really get into. I know that feeling. For the last few years I’ve had students sincerely question why they should have to remember (let alone memorize) anything, as the internet will always be there for them as a handy outboard brain. Thankfully, some of my students look horrified when they hear a classmate say this, but the fact that this scene keeps playing itself out is worrisome. I tell them that the internet is not going to be there for them when they’re having a conversation with some smart guy/gal who might be able to give them a job. If they don’t know (or have to look up cultural references on their iPhones) mid-conversation, s/he ain’t going to be impressed. This obviously isn’t the only reason why remembering stuff is important, but if the fact that a job in an increasingly awful and bifurcated economy might hinge on it won’t sway people, I don’t know what will.

And people accuse us humanists of being romantics…

Nodding Along

Posted on by under education, Other Critics, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

If you are having a great weekend and would rather not think about something completely depressing, something like, say, America’s fundamentally broken K-12 education system, then please do not click on this. If your weekend’s already all shot to hell though (hungover; alone again, naturally; hunting for a job; etc.), I’d like to encourage you to read Jerald Isseks’ honest and disturbing essay about the lies most of us tell and are told about public education. He makes a point that others have made before but can’t be made often enough:

Americans want to talk about how much our kids are failing these days. Those outside the educational system all have their fierce, personal criticisms. And on the front lines, in those faculty meetings, data sessions, and behind the closed doors of ruinous classrooms, teachers and administrators are telling the same stories. There’s the one about the unfocused kids who need to be taught discipline and compliance so they can get a job; the one about the parents who are setting a bad example and creating a negative home environment; the one about the teachers who aren’t a good fit because they aren’t holding their students accountable for doing work that renders them comatose. We tell these stories as we busy ourselves, trying to reassemble the parts of a machine we refuse to admit is fundamentally, and fatally, flawed. Just like we are. Meanwhile, our students are losing interest, losing hope, and vanishing from our records altogether, and for all the productive work we do, we aren’t doing much to bring them back.

Just like Bush before him, Obama has been a complete disaster on education. But Ryan and I have both said this before, and there’s honestly only so much a president can do about a byzantine system of interlocking federal and state policies designed to line the pockets of textbook publishers, tech companies, test companies, test prep companies, union bosses, accrediting agencies, and [insert just about anyone other than students and teachers here]. So yeah, I don’t expect the president (or a senator, or a governor) to come up with some plan to fix K-12 all at once. But I do expect them to be as honest about the state of things as Isseks is. Instead, we get conservatives bleating that collective bargaining is the source of all of our problems, liberals screaming that dumping more money into horribly managed schools is the only obvious solution, technocrats acting like giving every kid an iPad is something other than a giveaway to Silicon Valley, and parents, teachers, and students absolving themselves of any responsibility.

The truth is that we’re all to blame for what’s happening. I teach college in part because the idea of teaching high school kids how to write is terrifying and depressing for all of the reasons Isseks outlines in his article. That’s lame on my part, and I should own that. Still, if Isseks and I are willing to admit our own complicity, shouldn’t everyone else? Shouldn’t our elected officials and technocrat class admit that they totally didn’t see how their fulsome embrace of neoliberal globalization would lead to the hollowing out of the middle class, effectively making a high school diploma worthless to anyone trying to earn anything other than minimum wage? Shouldn’t teachers unions acknowledge that granting K-12 teachers tenure so quickly and placing so much emphasis on seniority at the expense of quality can lead to some pretty perverse consequences? And shouldn’t the president take a step back and think about how his “college for everyone” rhetoric might be hurting more than it’s helping?

Obviously, none of this will happen. We live in a country where a not insignificant portion of the population would rather see us go back into an economic depression than live under the other party’s health care system (which was originally their party’s health care plan, but whatever, nothing to see here). People seem to care more about being right even if that means being completely wrong. Liberals can be just as bad. And so we’ll keep doing the same things we’ve always done, just worse and with apps that make us think we are smarter and more advanced than we are. Happy f’ing Sunday, folks.

Just Stop

Posted on by under Authors, in the news, The Moronic Inferno

Jonathan Franzen is the second best essayist of his generation, just behind David Foster Wallace.* Amanda Hess is the 12,067th best essayist of her generation, so you can imagine the tenor and quality of her burn on Franzen over at “XX,” Slate‘s answer to a question Jezebel never asked. Sure, Franzen should get some ribbing for his long, fist-shaking Guardian article about how just about everything sucks now (even though he’s basically right). But that ribbing shouldn’t read like a drunk-text written by a college sophomore three weeks into her first Media Studies class. Hess writes:

Literature’s preeminent dude-bro took out his frustrations at a girl he “decided” not to have sex with (isn’t that how it always happens!) by fantasizing about old women destroying their bodies as they scrounge after his discarded fortunes. Franzen writes that he learned to overcome his youthful anger when he became a novelist, and was moved to empathize with other humans in the service of great literature; “to imagine what it’s like to be somebody you are not” is the “mental work that fiction fundamentally requires,” he now understands.

But Franzen is less enthused about the prospect of other humans actually responding to his stories—or, God forbid, telling their own stories without the aid of Franzen’s refined literary filter. Since Franzen came into this world in 1959 and human communication promptly went to hell in a handbasket—by the way, does that make Jonathan Franzen one of the horsemen of his own apocalypse?—people who do not look like Jonathan Franzen have leveraged the explosion of literary outlets to publish their own writing, tell their own experiences, and gain voices in the conversation. (Jennifer Weiner has already filed her response to Franzen’s essay in The New Republic, in a piece entitled, “What Jonathan Franzen Misunderstands About Me.”) But Franzen fails to draw any connection between the segregated swimming pools of his youth and his own ability to “find my place” as a writer in the long tail of that old world. Franzen briefly acknowledges the diversity argument just to knock it down. He expresses disappointment with the literary magazine N+1, which he says “denigrates print magazines as terminally ‘male,’ celebrates the internet as ‘female,’ and somehow neglects to consider the internet’s accelerating pauperisation of freelance writers.”

If Franzen had published his wistful German train station anecdote today, the “penny-pinching old German woman” could tweet evidence of Franzen’s insufficient tip; the hot girl could tell the world how their interaction really went down in an xoJane IHTM. That doesn’t mean that writers today have lost the ability to seriously explore the human condition. It means that a much wider and diverse group of humans now has the power to inform privileged literary voices like Franzen about what the conditions are actually like on the ground.

Honestly, I don’t even think Hess knows what she’s trying to say here. Cliched “he’s a bad tipper” Reddit posts and the just pathetic “please, somebody validate me” tripe of the reality TV/blogging/vlogging/TVlogging-sphere are not “conditions on the ground.” They are cries for help from people who can’t deal with the fact that the world hasn’t recognized how special they are, not literary criticism. Jonathan Franzen couldn’t care less about folks tweeting at him, let alone second-rate pop-feminist blogs saying that he does. But as Jennifer Wiener has made clear, there are second careers to be had griping in Franzen’s wake.

*For the record, I think Joan Didion is probably the greatest essayist of any generation.

Weekend Beats: Darkness Visible

Posted on by under Weekend Beats

One of the worst things that happens when a really talented artist commits suicide (you know other than the fact that they have committed suicide and are dead FOREVER), is that critics and fans often come to view all of their prior art through the lens of this single, destructive act. There’s nothing funny or subtle about suicide, so Sylvia Plath’s verses get read as odes to how awful the patriarchy is, and her depression comes to stand-in for the poet herself. But Plath’s depression (much less her suicide) didn’t write one of my favorite similes ever; a complex, witty, mean, smart, fucked up, whole woman thinking about motherhood as both entirely natural and unnatural at once did. From “Morning Song”:

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

As I’ve told many students, there are essays within essays contained in that single line. But the popular sense of Plath is that she was the living last line of “Daddy” stripped of any possible irony. She was pure ladyrage driven to its boiling point by the evil Ted Hughes. That version of Plath is not a real person, and we’re worse off as a culture for not coming to grips with all of Plath.

Plath’s fate is no different from Kurt Cobain’s. Nirvana’s In Utero (the band’s best album, in my opinion) turns 20 this year, and of course that means it’s being rereleased with all kinds of extras and stray bits attached. It also means that the Cobain as poete maudite narrative will likely be rehashed. Obviously the guy was depressed. But he was also this:

From this and other accounts, Cobain doesn’t seem like he was the easiest person to deal with. But even saying that is a lot more complex that saying he personified teenage angst or something pat like that. Artists aren’t symbols. Symbols don’t do anything. Only people can. And really talented people do things like this: